Safeguarding the Longue Durée: Environmental Rights in the Canadian Constitution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the modern era, environmental degradation is one of the most significant threats to human well-being and therefore to human rights. Biologically, the right to a viable environment supersedes all other human rights, including the right to life itself. It is not surprising, then, that the vast majority of nations with modern bills of rights have incorporated some form of environmental right or obligation into their constitutions. Respect for the environment is a fundamental value in Canada yet our constitution is silent on environmental rights and obligations. This article will argue that a limited right to environmental protection can nonetheless be found in existing Charter rights, while a more robust, comprehensive environmental right may be found in section 35 and/or may exist as an unwritten constitutional principle. The author concludes that an explicit amendment may be desirable in order to obtain the myriad benefits of constitutional environmental protection that have been documented globally.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".